Concrete Canvas: Merging Urban Art & AR

Who remembers our awe-inspiring, blippable street art mural that we did with EasyJet’s Traveller Magazine? Well if you don’t then blipp the EasyJet magazine cover to refresh your memory!!

One of the companies behind this innovative project was Global Street Art – a small team dedicated to archiving, promoting and creating new opportunities for street artists. One Friday afternoon we were lucky enough to have one of the founders, Lee Bofkin, to come in and explain the concept behind the company. Global Street Art started from Lee photographing and archiving, murals and wall paintings of street artists (worldwide) whose work remains largely lost in the temporal nature of the art form.

The Blippar team capitivated by the presentation.

Lee spoke of the social, as well as the aesthetic, benefits that street art can have as a form of regeneration and empowerment for local communities. He showed us a slideshow of guerrilla photos he’d taken from derelict tunnels, abandoned buildings and forgotten institutions - all brimming with incredible paintings, unwatched and unknown of, that are figuratively as well as literally underground. We quietly sucked in our breaths at the display of peacock coloured cartoons, surrealist shapes, bubbling letters and fine art paintings, giving testament to the legitimacy of concrete as a canvas for art and public space as a palette for paint.

Street Art example

As we all slowly disembarked from the board room with crayon textures and sprayed on patterns swimming around our heads, it became self-evident the ability that this art form has to subvert the norm of our seemingly static urban landscapes, to show the everyday as something that is in fact dynamic, changeable and malleable. Like us at Blippar, street art also looks to create life out of the inanimate, to create movement out of stasis and to (most importantly) ignite the human imagination beyond the limits and banality of our everyday reality. The presentation ends with our brains storming on how we can, once again, merge urban art with our dynamic and ever-creative technology.

For more information about Global Street Art, check their website.